Terror trail: Tracking operation 7/11

Mumbai: The 7/11 serial blasts in Mumbai are being looked upon as one of the biggest terror attacks that India has seen in the past 10 years. What did it take to execute that operation? And why did it slip through the intelligence network?

It was an operation that had not been planned overnight but over many months. And even though the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) had successfully captured 43 kilos of RDX near Aurangabad a month before the Mumbai blasts, terrorists had still struck home.

The reason — the possible use of sleeper terror cells.

"They have many cells some of them are active which we can trace. Others are sleeper cells which are difficult to find," DGP Maharashtra, P S Pasricha said.

And though many would have thought that it were the same men who were behind the Mumbai blasts blew a hole in that theory.

"Although they have not found any explosives here but they are still conducting tests. All the tests so far are inconclusive," Joint CP, ATS, Maharashtra, K P Raghuvanshi said.

It was the first pointer that the Aurangabad arms haul and this attack may have been different operations which working in parallel but with the same objective.

Then was it a red herring? And if it wasn't then how did the controllers execute the plan?

"They had to have local support to carry out their activities. So they have agents which are very difficult to find," Pasricha said.

Police sources say local support had come from members of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which has been operating under various aliases: